Japanese Speakers Perception of Syllable-final Stops and Inter-vocalic Consonant Clusters

Abstract

Japanese Speakers have been known to experience difficulty perceiving and pronouncing syllable-final stops and inter-vocalic consonant clusters. Therefore they find it difficult to correctly perceive and pronounce the syllable-final consonants and consonant clusers in languages such as Korean and English. This paper attempts to assess objectively the difficulty experienced by the Japanese speakers in perceiving the syllable-final consonants and intervocalic consonant clusters in Korean words. Three sets of pre-recorded Korean words were played to the Japanese speakers who were told to write down the words that they have heard in Roman letters, Japanese Kana letters, or phonetic symbols.